Computer and video game preservation projects unite!
A call to arms...
You probably know the problem already. How do we ensure that the computer and video games we played in the past will be available in the years to come, not only for ourselves but also for future generations and historians to study?
This question will not, and indeed cannot be answered by this article. The intention is to organise something that might help answer it, and hopefully actually help do it.
This is truly a huge task when you consider the many gaming systems produced over the years, the different technologies in use, and the hundreds or even thousands of games produced for many of them. It is very unlikely that a single entity is able to solve this problem.
Of course, some great work is being done already. There are lots of individuals and organisations out there that are nibbling away at the edges of this massive problem. Many of those entities have their own army of contributors, and there are bound to be many more people who would be willing to join in - if only they knew where to start. Without these efforts we may well have ended up with nearly all games irreversibly lost due to hardware failure of the systems that run them, and more worryingly, the corrosion of the media that the software resides on.
For games that do survive their physical media by these efforts there may still be some doubt over their authenticity since in the vast majority of cases, this can only be reliably verified while the original is still available, and this verification should preferably be done around the time that the game is “digitally liberatedâ€. Since this is often a very complicated thing to do (particularly on magnetic media such as floppy disks), it is likely that most games are still in danger of being lost from a preservation perspective. Some types of computer storage media only last a few years even when kept in the most optimal environments, and so it becomes an increasing desperate situation. The most important fact is that regardless of the life of the media, they will all develop errors and cease to function eventually.
This is the most pressing, but not the only problem. With many disparate projects attempting to preserve these titles, you are bound to get inefficiencies. For example:
- Overlap - duplication often becomes wasted effort that could otherwise be targeted in other more productive directions.
- Patchy use of standards - even though one way of doing something may be generally regarded as better than another.
- Fragmented inter-project communication - projects are bound to complement one another in various ways but may currently be unaware of each other and so are unable to mutually benefit.
The extent of these problems in practice remains to be seen. However it is probably safer to assume they are widespread.
I propose that we, as the computer and video game preservation community kick-start the preservation SIG (Special Interest Group) at the IGDA (International Games Developers Association, http://www.igda.org).
Now before the screams of horror reach my ears let me state that I do not think that all these projects should become members of an umbrella organisation whose purpose is to tell them what to do, and lay down just enough bureaucracy that nobody gets any work done.
This most certainly wouldn’t work.
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If you fit into any of the above categories please join with us to move this official IGDA Special Interest Group forward. We can then take this to the broader public and start discussing the issues as well as actually getting down and doing the work.
For more information, and to get your project or organisation added to the list of proposed interested parties, please email .
I'm actually working on a project like this, which I'd like to discuss with you 
I'll send you an email!
The extent of these problems in practice remains to be seen. However it is probably safer to assume they are widespread.
I'm 100% behind the spirit of your idea, but before this gets any momentum or SIG status, you are going to have to go beyond assumptions and prove that this is a real problem.
There are museams specifically dedicated to Video Games, there are personal collections that rival those of museaums, so again, while I understand your spirit, I'm not quite sure that this is a real problem (not saying it isn't, just saying I'm not convinced).
Originally posted by Rameen
I'm actually working on a project like this, which I'd like to discuss with you
I'll send you an email!
Interesting! I'd love to know more, so yes, please do!
Originally posted by ricardorademacher
I'm 100% behind the spirit of your idea, but before this gets any momentum or SIG status, you are going to have to go beyond assumptions and prove that this is a real problem.
Do you mean just for the section you quoted, or for the whole thing?
The section you quote is only part of the problem, and that part is about getting projects to work together and communicate. Although I believe this should be a part of what the SIG does (in my experience there is not much of this right now), it is certainly not the whole story. The wider need of the SIG is to linking up these projects with the games industry, and provides a focus point for the public in general.
There are museams specifically dedicated to Video Games, there are personal collections that rival those of museaums, so again, while I understand your spirit, I'm not quite sure that this is a real problem (not saying it isn't, just saying I'm not convinced).
Ah yes, but the large majority of those collections and museums collate only physical copies of the games. Lets consider games on magnetic media such as floppy disks for example. A museum might hold thousands of items, but how many of those games do you think will actually work in 50 years time (let alone when the copyright expires)? The answer is none. The media simply does not last that long. It depends on the conditions, but from research I have seen, the reliable life of a floppy disk seems to be about 10 years, and I have seen plenty of 20-year old disks completely degraded. Many might last over 30 years when kept in good conditions, they just (obviously) don't last forever.
More to the point though, if a disk has errors, how do you know? If somebody has mucked about with it, and it is altered, how do you know? It is *very* important we have the original, unaltered artifacts for archival (this is critically important for any form of preservation) in a digital form not tied to the prison(!) that is its original media. Of course, digital preservation creates problems in itself (media refreshs needed, etc.) and that is something we just have to live with in today's digital world.
Games are unlike any other medium in their form, and requirements. If collectors and museums want to preserve the items, they should not stop at collecting physical copies, they should hold "time proof" (subject to proper backups) copies too. Only then do we *really* have preservation of the games. What you say does bring up and interesting point - the SIG should be about education too! With the SIG, I want to link up these museums and archivists with the technology projects that can enable them to do what must be done.
Anyway, please elaborate on any other points you would like to know more about, and I will do my best to answer you questions. I have been working on game preservation for five years or so now, and from my perspective I see fundermental problems with the way things are now. I believe the SIG will really help put a united front on things.
Kieron-All:
I agree with all of your points here, but there are 3 things that could stop all of this in it's tracks:
* Standardization of Archiving-The concept of 'not being too rule-restrictive' is a good one, but I think that folks need guidance in order to move this forward. Setting up a general set of rules is paramount to getting the most forward momentum. Picking specific archiving formats for the various OS, error-checking tools, final archiving medium type (CD-ROM?), and a 'what's been done already' database would be good places to start.
* Copyright Infringement--Although the DMCA exemptions made in-roads, all software still falls under the same copyright laws it always had. Some questions on this:
-What qualifies as an 'educational, or research' institution. I can call myself a library, but if I get taken to court, I doubt that it would hold up as a defense.
-What protection do we have against someone distributing this data? I'd hate to add our collection to the database, only to be involved in a future court battle, because one of our group felt he/she could make some spare change on Ebay by selling our work. :S
-Where would the final data be archived? Who decides who has access?
* Development House 'Buy-In'--Getting the BIG companies' endorsement would be paramount to success. But what if EA or Microsoft decides not to join? Would anything we do after that be considered 'against the law'?
Please don't take my thoughts as pessimism. I'm only attempting to bring to the surface some of the first thought processes necessary to cover ourselves. The answer to these (and many other) questions should most definitely be specified in a charter.
"...Preserving Worlds..."
Joe Garrity
Curator of The Origin Museum
http://www.originmuseum.net
Originally posted by OriginMuseum
Kieron-All:
I agree with all of your points here, but there are 3 things that could stop all of this in it's tracks:
Hello Joe, thanks for your input!
* Standardization of Archiving-The concept of 'not being too rule-restrictive' is a good one, but I think that folks need guidance in order to move this forward. Setting up a general set of rules is paramount to getting the most forward momentum. Picking specific archiving formats for the various OS, error-checking tools, final archiving medium type (CD-ROM?), and a 'what's been done already' database would be good places to start.
Archiving formats: I assume you mean the best available archiving technology/format for a particular game system? I did indeed plan on doing this.
Error checking tools: Unfortunately not as much attention is made to this as it should be, but I totally agree that they should be put down as mandatory where available, and maybe we should try to point out areas for improvement if we can...
Final archive medium: This is a nasty one. CDR's/DVDR's are basically terrible as an archive solution, in general they are seen as less reliable than floppy disks! (ironically, commercially pressed CD/DVD's are reported to be extremely good when kept properly). The best advice I have seen is to keep preserved items on hard disks (some kind of RAID mirror preferable), and keep backups on DVDR's - but with a mindset that the DVDR's are likely to fail within a few years. Hopefully BlueRay/HD-DVD writable discs will be better, but I doubt it.
"What's been done already": Not entirely sure what you mean by this. Do you mean actually listing the games preserved so far? To start with, this might be best left to the participating projects. A long term goal of integrating this information is a good idea though. We will have to discuss how we can do that without putting too much burden on the projects doing the archiving - I'm all for meta data, but slowing them down with it is probably not a good idea with so much to do anyway.
Great ideas though, thanks. I have made notes on these things.
* Copyright Infringement--Although the DMCA exemptions made in-roads, all software still falls under the same copyright laws it always had.
Indeed, and AFAIK those exceptions might expire next year (??). Something I need to find out about ASAP...
Some questions on this:
-What qualifies as an 'educational, or research' institution. I can call myself a library, but if I get taken to court, I doubt that it would hold up as a defense.
Indeed, until we know for sure, we will not be able to preserve games that we do not own. Also, projects which are outside the US will of course be subject to their local laws and not the DMCA, which all need to be researched, as appropriate. But you are right of course, we need to see how we can be officially recognised as some sort of digital library to ensure we qualify for any protection this gives us under whatever laws we are subject to. If the laws are limiting, then we need to lobby changes to them.
In the long run, I think it depends on how we go about things. I plan for us to work with real libraries similarly to the book-scanning momentum's in the media at the moment (the difference possibly being that we need to convince them that games should be preserved in the first place). I think that since we will not be distributing the preserved games (other than those we have been granted specific rights by the copyright owners to do so), and being a non-profit organisation it should (I hope) be looked upon as a benefit to society and come under fair use (similar to Google's argument). IANAL, and we need to be more sure than from the little research I have done already, that is certain. The outcome of the Google case will be very interesting for us.
In the mean time, we can only preserve the games that we own. The organisation I am affiliated with (the Software Preservation Society) owns probably approaching 10,000. And I know of projects who work in similar ways, so we have a lot to get started (and individual projects have been working on this for years already).
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-What protection do we have against someone distributing this data? I'd hate to add our collection to the database, only to be involved in a future court battle, because one of our group felt he/she could make some spare change on Ebay by selling our work. :S
I am not sure if you mean meta-data, the actual games, or both?
Actual games: Since we cannot distribute the games themselves, I would expect most people would not have access to all of them anyway - even within the group. At least until we are sure this is okay to do - in the long run I would hate for each partner project to be responsible for archiving the actual games - its not a very full-proof solution. Ideally, I would like to get somebody like the Internet Archive to do that archiving for us. If it did happen, the responsibility would fall to the original copyright owner(s) obviously. But if it uses technology from a partner project, we could probably enforce copyright on that.
Meta-data: I think the best we can do is slap a commercially restrictive license on the data (if we decide we want to, we could say commerical usage is allowed after a separate license from us, with appropriate fees - which will certainly help our preservation efforts). If somebody goes and puts it on ebay, the only thing I think we can do is have it pulled. Do you have any other ideas? Of course, we could take another stance with the meta-data... and put it in the public domain, or under some other liberal license. This would require carefull consideration of the pros and cons, and whether we actually did this or not would obviously require consent from *all* partner projects. I am unsure of any particular direction right now, but I just thought I would throw that idea in there...
-Where would the final data be archived? Who decides who has access?
Initially the sub-projects of the SIG will only have access to their own archived games until we are sure what we can and cannot do. Moving forward, I would want a specialist body like the Internet Archive to do it. As for access, I have no idea. I guess only some select "copyright enforcement officers" who have the responsility to manage and distribute only that which is allowed by law. For example, if a partner project looses all their data, they would have a right to get that data back from the central archive, since they own, and are the original contributors of those games anyway.
* Development House 'Buy-In'--Getting the BIG companies' endorsement would be paramount to success. But what if EA or Microsoft decides not to join? Would anything we do after that be considered 'against the law'?
We can archive the games we own irrespective of copyright owner wishes. It would certainly create problems in that we need to get hold of their back catalog (as well as all the back catalogue's of all the companies that -for example- EA has bought over the years). But to archive the games in the first place we would mainly need to do that anyway. In my experience games companies don't generally keep original copies of their old games, due to being lost, broken, lack of interest, etc. So we would be looking for their permission to archive games sourced from people that do own them.
Of course, there is the matter of the EULA's you see with games nowadays, which may forbid this kind of archiving. I guess this is a civil matter though, and rather falls back to fair use, and being recognised as a "digital library". It would be some kind of cruel joke on society if the games these companies produced were lost and forgotten because of an overzelous license agreement. Newer games are perhaps not the main priority however, since the media is likely to last longer than we will live, unlike games from 10 or more years ago which used different media that only lasts 10-30 (yeah, not too good that). They are important, yes, and we should still contact games companies to get them on board to help make preservation of their current games easier in the future, but they are not in as much danger of being lost right now.
Please don't take my thoughts as pessimism. I'm only attempting to bring to the surface some of the first thought processes necessary to cover ourselves. The answer to these (and many other) questions should most definitely be specified in a charter.
Not at all. It is good to highlight possible pitfalls. It has been clear to me from the start that we need to be *very* careful if we are to be successful in this, and get support from the games industry at large. A charter is a good idea. Once we are officically operating, we can sort this out.
Personally I think the idea of achieving as many as possible of these old titles would be a fantastic thing. As has been discussed, most of this comes with legal implications though...really I couldn't see why any developer would complain to be honest but it’s one of those things which would have to be treated very softly.
Part of me keeps thinking of the groups who produce the “very unofficial†emulators for practically every bit of hardware ever made. Ok, the game is no longer on its original platform, but the game has survived thanks to the work of these people. And I have to respect the huge library’s of games from the 70's and 80's available through sources like this. And available to actually run on current systems is a brilliant way of putting the games I personally grew up on, in the hands of current generations. Even if they have bent a few laws.
I'm not sure if many of you might of seen DHTML Lemmings (http://www.funnygames.nl/host/games/lemmings/). I have to admit the guy who's done this has done a brilliant job with porting it over. And in one sense what better way to store a game for future generations than to put it online? (ok, I don't think anyone was likely to forget Lemmings, but it makes a nice example, even though its probably not as old as the games we are discussing here). And yes, I am also ignoring the legal issues here. But imagine a developer of an old game (or whoever now owns the rights to the title) having the chance to put it somewhere the public could experience it again, and if they are still developing what better place also to banner it up with their current product? The advertising prospects for the operators of the “archive†and those submitting the old games would be beneficial to both.
Other than legal issues, the only other are those of actually getting the games to run over the internet (ok this would need emulation and also probably a huge amount of time to port those titles not wanting to emulate correctly), internet tools, and capabilities of peoples connections. To say bring GTA3 to the web might be a huge problem (under current technologies)...but GTA? that’s possible. As is most games looking back 10 years or more. The ability to archive these games, and even make them available to future generations is possible.
With how advertising seems to be a huge driving force for so many things these days, it wouldn’t surprise me if something like this couldn’t turn a tidy profit. You could just about imagine Google or Yahoo doing something like this couldn’t you?
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What would be helpful is to make the SIG some sort of preservation hub. This will hopefully become a place where:
Having such an entity will hopefully encourage pear-review of project technology and preservation procedures. This is vitally important to help prevent “bad†preservation. This is where a game is thought to be “safe†but is later found (for example) to crash in the later levels or in certain situations because the storage medium has been corrupted or altered prior to its “preservationâ€. This is serious problem if it is not discovered until a time when no more working versions of the game exist. With such peer review, more advanced projects can help provide pointers on how this can be avoided.
Quality in preservation is paramount. Trying to digitally preserve faulty games is not only pointless; it is also dangerous because it gives people a false sense of security over those items. With a central resource of knowledge and expertise, we have a fantastic opportunity to group together advanced projects that know how to guard against such eventualities along with other projects who can come to learn about how to do the same.
So the question now is, exactly what and who should make up this global preservation effort?
Firstly, and most importantly we should say that anyone and everyone will be welcome to participate and discuss game preservation. The intention is that it be open to all. There should also be a list of ratified projects which make up the core of the entity, which can be listed on the website.
The kind of organisations, projects and individuals that would be good to attract are those that:
The aim is to get the above types of projects and individuals to work together to build an efficient and cooperative worldwide effort to preserve interactive works. Computer and video games are art, and being mankind’s first interactive entertainment media they deserve to be properly preserved so we don’t lose them forever. It is an immense task, but working together, with enough exposure, we can get this thing done.
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